Computational Imaging Encryption with Steganography and Lanthanide Luminescent Materials

Optical encryption is a potential scheme for information security that exploits abundant degrees of freedom of light to encode information. However, conventional encryption based on fluorescent materials faces challenges in handling complex secret information. Alternatively, single-pixel imaging (SPI) provides a computational modality to solve these problems. In this study, a high-capacity fluorescence encryption scheme, achieved by introducing lanthanide materials and steganography into the encoding and decoding processes of SPI is proposed. Two types of well-designed lanthanide luminescent materials are utilized and excited to generate fluorescence images (fluo-images), which are crucial in this scheme. Various practical experiments using fluo-images as secret keys demonstrate the robustness, effectiveness, and repeatability of this scheme. Furthermore, multi-image experiments indicate the potential of this method to increase secret information capacity. Thus, the proposed fluorescence encryption scheme does provide an efficient computational encryption strategy based on lanthanide luminescent materials for information security, which can improve the security of traditional optical encryption and simultaneously enhance the flexibility of SPI computational decryption.